1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of data communications for personal computers (PCs), and in particular to a system for delivering content, such as targeted on-line advertising, to a client device, where such delivery is not in response to a specific request for such content.
2. Related Art
The Internet is quickly becoming the preferred data communications medium for a broad class of computer users ranging from private individuals to large multi-national corporations. Such users now routinely employ the Internet to access information, distribute information, correspond electronically, and even conduct personal conferencing. An ever-growing number of individuals, organizations and businesses have established a presence on the Internet through “Web pages” on the World-Wide Web (“the Web”).
As the popularity of the Internet has grown, so too have opportunities for on-line marketing. Advertising through the Internet has become enormously popular. Indeed, in some cases on-line services like e-mail are provided free of charge as long as users are willing to receive on-line advertisements.
On-line advertisements are typically included as an integral part of the content on Web pages. This approach suffers from a variety of limitations. For example, users tend to follow hyperlinks and move from one Web page to another, much like “surfing” the channels on a television. Unfortunately, such user behavior reduces the impact of advertising, as advertisements generally require captive audiences to be most effective. There is currently no reliable method for ensuring an Internet user's attention.
To illustrate another limitation, advertisers generally must purchase individual rights on particular Web pages to distribute their advertisements, since the link to an advertisement is authored into the content. This makes advertising sales a difficult proposition given the enormous number of Web pages on the Internet. Enterprises known as “consolidators,” such as Doubleclick, purchase rights on certain pages and allow many advertisers to share the same space, but such approaches do not solve the fundamental problem that advertising space on each Web page must be individually acquired.
Yet another limitation of existing approaches to on-line advertising relates to difficulties in achieving so-called “targeted advertising,” wherein advertisements are specifically tailored to the recipient's interests and preferences. Targeted advertising on the Internet has typically been attempted using a device known as a “cookie,” which is a data item used to maintain client-specific information, such as a marketing profile, accessible by facilities that do not necessarily communicate with one another. For example, a cookie stored on a client device may be accessed by any number of Web sites which that client device visits, assuming those Web sites are preconfigured to do so. Unfortunately, propagating this type of functionality to the many thousands of Web sites on the Internet is impractical.
Another approach to targeted advertising on the Internet involves deriving profile information by analyzing the Web sites that particular users visit, as maintained in a standard logging device known as a “clickstream.” Again, however, there is no one widely-implemented mechanism for collecting clickstreams. Even for those Web sites so-equipped, the current state of the art requires the resource-intensive task of merging logs from all of the sites visited by a user.
Still more limitations of existing approaches to on-line advertising relate to the nature of the on-line advertisements themselves. On-line advertisements are typically limited in richness due to unacceptable additional latencies that would be introduced by large or highly-rich advertisements. Also, since advertisements must be rendered by a browser installed on the client device, advertisers are restricted with respect to the use of more sophisticated, non-standard data formats and compression techniques. Only those datatypes supported by the browser may be used.
In view of the foregoing limitations, there is a need for a system capable of providing targeted distribution of content to network users without requiring widespread changes to existing network infrastructures.